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Sales Gravy

Why Commoditized Selling Builds Better Salespeople

35 min episode · 2 min read
·
Marcus Chan

Episode

35 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Investing, Leadership, Sales & Revenue

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Root Cause Diagnosis First: Before deploying any sales training, conduct a two-week diagnostic analyzing CRM data, call recordings across funnel stages, and interviews with top, middle, and bottom performers plus managers. HubSpot research shows only 10% of training content is retained after 90 days when organizations skip diagnosis and train on the wrong problem entirely.
  • Management System Gaps Are the #1 Fix: Approximately 75–80% of sales organizations have managers who are either super-reps still selling deals or passive dashboard-checkers. Fixing eight to twelve managers to run structured one-on-ones, field rides, and call reviews creates leverage across their entire teams, impacting 25% or more of total sales output without external resources.
  • ADVANCED Framework for Deal Qualification: Use the ADVANCED acronym — Acknowledge problem, Documented issue, Validated by team, Authorized by exec, Narrowed to external, Chosen vendor, Established timeline, Deal terms finalized — to map where buyers actually are versus CRM stage labels. Reaching stage five or beyond produces close rates approaching 90%.
  • Pipeline vs. Forecast Qualification: A deal sitting in a proposal stage in the CRM does not equal a forecast-committed deal. Forecast-qualified requires confirmed economic buyer involvement, multiple stakeholder validation, and documented urgency. Managers must explicitly distinguish between a rep's goal and a rep's commitment — a number the rep would stake their mortgage on delivering.
  • Three-by-Three-by-Three Field Coaching: Spend four half-days per month in the field with reps, running three appointments per session. After each session, deliver three specific behavioral wins to reinforce and three precise improvement opportunities — for example, coaching the RIM follow-up question framework (Relevance, Impact, Motive). Follow up with a written email recap to enable progress tracking in future one-on-ones.

What It Covers

Marcus Chan, CEO of Vendly Consulting and Wall Street Journal bestselling author, explains how commoditized selling environments like uniform and telecom sales build stronger foundational skills than high-ticket SaaS roles, and outlines his Revenue Engine OS framework for diagnosing and fixing hidden sales organization failures.

Key Questions Answered

  • Root Cause Diagnosis First: Before deploying any sales training, conduct a two-week diagnostic analyzing CRM data, call recordings across funnel stages, and interviews with top, middle, and bottom performers plus managers. HubSpot research shows only 10% of training content is retained after 90 days when organizations skip diagnosis and train on the wrong problem entirely.
  • Management System Gaps Are the #1 Fix: Approximately 75–80% of sales organizations have managers who are either super-reps still selling deals or passive dashboard-checkers. Fixing eight to twelve managers to run structured one-on-ones, field rides, and call reviews creates leverage across their entire teams, impacting 25% or more of total sales output without external resources.
  • ADVANCED Framework for Deal Qualification: Use the ADVANCED acronym — Acknowledge problem, Documented issue, Validated by team, Authorized by exec, Narrowed to external, Chosen vendor, Established timeline, Deal terms finalized — to map where buyers actually are versus CRM stage labels. Reaching stage five or beyond produces close rates approaching 90%.
  • Pipeline vs. Forecast Qualification: A deal sitting in a proposal stage in the CRM does not equal a forecast-committed deal. Forecast-qualified requires confirmed economic buyer involvement, multiple stakeholder validation, and documented urgency. Managers must explicitly distinguish between a rep's goal and a rep's commitment — a number the rep would stake their mortgage on delivering.
  • Three-by-Three-by-Three Field Coaching: Spend four half-days per month in the field with reps, running three appointments per session. After each session, deliver three specific behavioral wins to reinforce and three precise improvement opportunities — for example, coaching the RIM follow-up question framework (Relevance, Impact, Motive). Follow up with a written email recap to enable progress tracking in future one-on-ones.

Notable Moment

Chan described working with an MSP firm that closed transactional deals at a 25% win rate but collapsed to a 4% win rate on enterprise deals over $100K. After a targeted engagement fixing their enterprise go-to-market process, win rates climbed above 25% and average deal size grew from $10K to over $250K within six months.

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Episode Transcript

Join us for the fanatical prospecting boot camp that will help your team five x their pipeline in ninety days or less. We'll be hosting it on March in Atlanta, Georgia. Go to salesgravy.com/live. That's salesgravy.com/live and use the code podcast to save a $100. This is the Sales Gravy Podcast. Hi. I'm Jeb Blunt, best selling author of fanatical prospecting objections, sales EQ, and inked, and I'm here to help you open more doors, close bigger deals, and rock your commission check. Welcome back to the Sales Groovy podcast. I'm Judblin Junior, and I'm so excited to have you here today. We have a long time follow for me, but a first time connection. And this is actually a first time we're meeting each other, which is really cool. We had a a fun conversation about what we do in the in the sales world. I I I wanna introduce you to this powerhouse in the sales industry, mister Marcus Chan. He's the CEO of Vendly Consulting where he helps b two b sales teams uncover 2 to 10,000,000 plus dollars in hidden revenue by installing the revenue engine OS or operating system. He's a Wall Street Journal best selling author of the 6 figure sales secrets, and Marcus previously led a $195,000,000 a yield a year sales organization. And after 12 promotions to I don't how do you get promoted 12 times? 12 promotions in eight in eight years, he has been recognized multiple times by Salesforce as a top sales influencer. He also writes for Salesforce, and he hosts the revenue vault podcast. That's the revenue vault podcast, so go check that out and subscribe there, which focuses on systematized predictable growth. Marcus, thank you so much for joining us on the Sales Gary podcast. You know, Joe, I'm pumped to be here. I'm I'm happy to share all the mistakes I've made in my career, and, hopefully, the listeners and watchers will learn from my mistakes. You know, I I I like that you bring up mistakes. We were talking earlier. My my first question is gonna hold off because I wanna give a little bit of background to you and and and why I think that you have a unique perspective into sales organizations, what drives value, and that's your background in commoditized selling. A lot of people who work in your space, who work with tech companies and do sales training come out of high ticket sales. And you came out of a space that is really dirty. It's really nasty. It's really cool, and you get to work with tons of, really great customers, but you have to sell yourself. And you came out of out of uniform sales much like Jeb Blunt senior did. So give us a little bit of background in, like, how you got to where you are. Yeah. 100%. So I think the the first piece is, you know, what I found across the board is, you know, …

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  • by HubSpot

    HubSpot research shows only 10% of training content is retained after 90 days when organizations skip diagnosis and train on the wrong problem entirely.

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